Bellway additions negotiations - popular development

shabani

I was looking at a popular Bellway development in Essex. The flats have as standard,

• flooring and carpets
• fridge freezer
• washer dryer

The flats seem to be selling quite quickly and they were not offering any free extras or any reductions.
There are offering to pay the stamp duty if you use a solicitor from a list they give to you. This is worth nearly £4k on 2 bed flats.-

What I found was that the service charge and building insurance were really high - £3k pa.
Bellway seem quite confident of the interest that they have released another block to be completed in 12 months hence does not qualify for Help to Buy.

clint_S

£280K for a two bed flat. I can get a large 4 bed detached house for that around my area. HTB do not like stamp duty being paid by the builder.


Check with you IFA what will be allow and what you can't ask for before you speak to Bellway, once you reserve they will give you a short period, around 28 days, to complete.

libf

clint_S wrote: »

£280K for a two bed flat. I can get a large 4 bed detached house for that around my area. HTB do not like stamp duty being paid by the builder.


Check with you IFA what will be allow and what you can't ask for before you speak to Bellway, once you reserve they will give you a short period, around 28 days, to complete.

28 days to exchange. And if the build finish is more than 6 months away that probably won't be enforced.

TBeckett100

Are builder incentives allowed as part of the Help to Buy Scheme?

Under the terms of the Help to Buy Scheme, the builder is not allowed to provide any cash incentives.
Sales incentives e.g. stamp duty, reasonable legal fees and fixtures and fittings are permitted.

clint_S

TBeckett100 wrote: »

Are builder incentives allowed as part of the Help to Buy Scheme?

Under the terms of the Help to Buy Scheme, the builder is not allowed to provide any cash incentives.
Sales incentives e.g. stamp duty, reasonable legal fees and fixtures and fittings are permitted.

The information I gain from looking around the web and my IFA is.....


- the builder can reduce the cost of the house, but will need to write explaining why they gave a discount.
- If Stamp duty is included it is usually added to the value of the house by HTB and this has a high percentage of being rejected unless you apply for the HTB using the total cost of the house + stamp duty.
- Legal fees are allowed, but many Mortgages do not allow this.
- Fixture and fittings are allowed, but again the majority of Mortgages do not allow them, for example they are allowed with Nationwide but not Halifax.

antonusklesk

Some interesting points raised on the legitimacy of whether or not a builder can even offer incentives dependent on mortgage. I wasn't aware for example that some mortgages will disallow fixtures and fittings incentives. Thankfully ours will be with Nationwide so there shouldn't be a problem getting anything I manage to squeeze out of Bellway through.

Still a few weeks until a potential reservation when the plot we're after is released. At least I'm going in with a little more exposure to what's possible now, but still completely up in the air what we might end up getting, if anything.

g40lew

We have just had our mortgage offer from Natwest and obviously had our Authority to proceed from the Help to Buy agency a while ago. All of which states that we are having Stamp Duty paid and £1000 towards legal from the developer so that side of it is definitley possible with at least Natwest.

TBeckett100

I can assure you that having experience with H2B and Halifax, they dont add SDLT to the cost nor are incentives banned by Halifax. You can have 5% incentives with Halifax.

clint_S

TBeckett100 wrote: »

I can assure you that having experience with H2B and Halifax, they dont add SDLT to the cost nor are incentives banned by Halifax. You can have 5% incentives with Halifax.

I can only go on what my IFA and builders IFAs confirmed, yes I had this confirmed by two different unrelated IFA on this, and that is Halifax do not like F&F incentives, they must be put through as upgrades and not listed as incentives.


Stamp duty and HTB depends on your region as there is not a central agreement on whether they are allowed or not. In my region, North West Stamp Duty must be combined with the HTB, however the Catalyst region (Bucks, Berks & Oxon), I believe, does not allow Stamp duty to be paid by the builder. There were some HTB agents that allowed it.

antonusklesk

To update this....I haven't managed to get to the negotiations stage with Bellway. The plot we wanted was released late yesterday afternoon, and Bellway proceeded to call everyone interested in that particular model of house and place them in a race to get to the showroom. 40 minutes later and the plot was gone, needless to say me and my wife as well as plenty of others have ended up disappointed. Not a fan at all of the way this was conducted, or the situation.

I thought the problem for first time buyers was supposed to be not being able to afford a house, rather than physically not being able to reserve a plot because the developer pits everyone in a race against each other. I'd not seen the downside to HTB being available to everyone including non-FTBs before now, but at least around here I can't see how we'll be able to get a plot reserved with so much demand.